


You've got the wrong face (but all the right lines)

by lonelywalker



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Age Difference, Couch Sex, F/M, Injury Recovery, Older Man/Younger Woman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 21:07:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4681508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seriously injured and trailing blood all over Central City, the Reverse Flash goes to the only place he can: Caitlin Snow's apartment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've got the wrong face (but all the right lines)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [majcrtom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/majcrtom/gifts).



> Title from Joe McElderry's "Someone Wake Me Up".
> 
> Slight AU following 1x20, so Eo never kidnapped Eddie and left him tied up in a basement.

The first thing he worries about is the suit. It’s an automatic, instinctual response to the pain, he knows, to distract himself with irrelevant concerns. But he can feel the wet soak of blood up against the leather, and bullet holes are a _bitch_ to repair.

After ten blocks in a second he’s out of danger and he still has his speed, but the speed force can only do so much when every step sends a jolt of pain through him that’s so intense it’s nauseating. He dodges into an alley, his knee buckles, and he slams shoulder-first into the side of a dumpster. The clatter echoes and echoes. A cat wails from twenty feet away. 

“Gideon. Directions.” He’s run this city a hundred times, but he’s lightheaded, disoriented, his command a whisper.

“To the lab, Dr. Wells?”

Gideon’s relentless ability to stay completely calm in any kind of crisis is an irritation as much as it is a blessing. If only he could do what Barry does and call a team who would also guide him home, but voice the tiniest bit of concern when they did so.

He presses a gloved hand to his side, where the leather is ripped and he feels like he’s being burned from the inside out. “No, Gideon. Not the lab.”

It’s late, but not _very_ late, and there are enough people moving around the apartment complex that he might have worried about being seen. But he has no time for worries. He’d crash to the floor of the elevator and let that take him to the right floor if he could guarantee he’d actually get up again. Let the neighbors see a man in yellow leather with glowing red eyes slumped bleeding in the corner. Let them dare to call the police.

She lives on a high, high floor, and though he’s there in mere moments he pauses by her door, the one modestly marked _C. Snow_ , and considers whether he has any options at all that don’t involve knocking.

He knocks.

There’s no answer, and he has no time before blood starts trickling down to the floor, so he vibrates the lock and lets himself in. “Caitlin?” It’s only when he hears his own voice that he realizes he’s still vibrating, still looking like an inhuman nightmare. One hand pressed tightly to his side, he tears off the mask. “Caitlin?” Now his voice is normal, but too faint. Without the light from his eyes, the apartment seems very dark and very empty. 

He pushes the door closed and palms the light switch by the door. Where is she? Working late? Plotting and planning at the Wests’ house? He could have Gideon check the lab, or even tap into city surveillance cameras to find her, but the answer is irrelevant. She’s not here, and he can’t go anywhere else. 

Blood is streaming down a gap between his pants and boot, smearing her carpet as he limps toward her couch. His legs give out before he gets there, sending him slamming into her coffee table. Immaculate, polished, probably never used, one or more of its legs cracks under his weight. He rolls over amid the wreckage, unbearably tired, the pain blurring his vision. “Gideon…” he says, and blacks out.

It feels like an age has passed when he feels a cool hand on his face, tugging up his eyelids, shining a dazzling light in his eyes. He blinks, pulls away. He would thrust out an arm as defense, but his body feels leaden.

“Dr. Wells?”

They haven’t been alone together since the day everything came out in the open, and it’s surely never been more evident now that he’s _not_ Dr. Wells. At least, he wasn’t originally. She could have Barry here in seconds (maybe she’s already called him). She could just refuse to help him. But simply the sound of her voice makes him relax, the way it had after the accident, when he’d woken up broken amid chaos. “Caitlin,” he says, surprised that the word is even audible.

“You’re not going to let me call an ambulance, are you?” She’s unzipping his jacket, peeling it away from his side. “You could’ve got shot on a night I _didn’t_ spend the evening at a bar.”

Maybe having a few drinks is what’s made her brave enough to help him, to take things as lightheartedly as this. But she doesn’t sound anywhere near drunk.

“Karaoke?” he asks.

“A Cisco and Joe duet. I caught some of it on my phone… You don’t heal like Barry does?”

Not tonight, apparently. “Often not as quickly.” He swallows, studying that concerned expression on her face he knows so well. “The bullet’s still in there.”

“I know. And the amount of blood you’re losing… I can’t tell what it might have hit. Your intestines could be shredded. You could have _multiple_ infections about to go on the rampage.”

“Just… Just get the bullet out. I’ll probably heal.”

She could likely never look at him so sternly if he wasn’t lying in a yellow suit in the middle of a shattered coffee table. “ _Probably_? Can’t you do that thing you taught Barry? Phase so it’s not in you anymore?”

“I can’t focus.” He can barely even focus on her.

Caitlin sits back on her heels. “I could call Barry. He could take us to the lab. I’d have scanners, equipment, the proper tools…”

“ _Caitlin_.”

“I know. But don’t blame me if I have to patch you up with tampons and dental floss.”

She does better than that, from the little he sees while his head swims. How _stupid_ it would be, to have waited for fifteen long years, plotting and planning, to have it all undone by one stray bullet he should have dodged with about a mile to spare. He wants to go home, yes. It’s the one desire that’s kept him from utter despair over the last decade and a half. But here, while Caitlin frowns studiously over his wound, he feels safer than he ever could anywhere else. 

“What do you think, Doctor?” His tone is supposed to be one of dry humor. Instead, he can barely get the words out.

She’s tearing off strips of surgical tape, smoothing gauze to his side. She holds up the bullet between her thumb and forefinger. “Got it. But it’ll be a miracle if getting it out didn’t do more damage than good. Anyone else might’ve bled to death by now.”

“I’m… An unusual case.”

“ _Really_. I’d never have guessed.”

Caitlin sits back on her heels, rolling off the latex gloves that are smeared with his blood. Now that it’s done – if he lifts his head, he can see the pristine white bandage – she looks even more troubled, chewing her lip, probably wondering if she should contact Barry or Joe. Now that he might not be a dying victim in need of her help, he’s only a wanted criminal hiding out in her apartment.

But she clears her throat before he can think up something to say, to convince her. “Let’s get you up on the couch,” she says. “You can’t lie on the floor all night. But _carefully_. Those stitches were enough trouble to do once.”

He’s dizzy, pain still shooting down his leg if he tries to put weight on it, but he lets her pull away his yellow jacket and gloves, and together they manage to haul him up onto the couch. Which is soft and smells of tulips, and all he wants to do is sleep.

The next time he opens his eyes, he’s still there: pillow beneath his head, a fuzzy baby-blue blanket covering him. His boots are neatly positioned by the opposite wall, his jacket hung over the back of a chair. He blinks hard and presses exploratory fingers to his side. He winces.

“Don’t mess with it,” Caitlin says. She’s in her work clothes, a blouse and long skirt, brushing damp hair. Light is coming through the windows. “I checked a while ago. It’s better than it should be, but you’re not Barry.”

“No… I’m not.”

She finishes with the brush and stands watching him, arms folded. “I’m going to meet them, you know. We’re going to spend all day brainstorming about where you might be and how to stop you, while you’re lying on my couch with your guts being held in by stitches and scotch tape. At least when I leave I can pretend you’ve gone.”

“I’ll go,” he says.

“No, don’t…” Caitlin frowns. “I don’t even know who you are anymore. But I’d tell Harrison Wells, my boss, my friend, the good man I’ve known for years, to stay put.”

“And the Reverse Flash?”

She takes her coat from the hook by the door. “I guess if the Reverse Flash ever came here I’d speed-dial Barry, wouldn’t I?”

And, with a close and lock of the door, he’s alone.

He sleeps. The next time he wakes, his side is less tender and he’s ravenously hungry. Her kitchen isn’t well-stocked, but he does what he can, promising himself that tomorrow she’ll find it restocked to the rafters. He makes himself hotdogs and downs all the soda he can find, switching her TV to the local news network. There’s plenty of news, some of it possibly involving the crimefighting efforts of the Flash, but none about a firefight with a yellow-suited madman. Normally he’d ask Gideon for the latest on what the S.T.A.R. Labs computers are being used for, but at the moment it seems impolite to pry.

Staying there for hours in her apartment, it occurs to him that it might be the most normal afternoon he’s ever had, and the first day free from all work in fifteen years, other than the time he’d been forced to stay in the hospital after the accident.

By mid-afternoon, he finds a t-shirt that must have belonged to Ronnie or some earlier boyfriend, and ventures outside to look for a supply closet. He’s back in seconds with everything he needs to clean up Caitlin’s blood-spattered carpet at superhuman speed, and to repair her table, which is something he enjoys doing at a more normal pace. 

When everything is as good as new, he considers letting her find it this way, like he’d never been here at all. She might even be hoping to come home and find him gone, as if it were all a dream and she’d never saved the life of the Flash’s worst nightmare. He’d only need to pull his boots and jacket back on, and leave for one of his safehouses or for Grodd’s lair. But he wriggles back under the blanket instead. Something in him truly doesn’t want to leave this little piece of snatched domesticity, and he knows Caitlin’s always appreciated an obedient patient.

To his surprise, he sleeps, his dreams a muddle of city streets, a beach at sunset, the faces of people he can’t completely remember… And her fingertips on his cheek, thumb smoothing back an unruly lock of hair that had curled forward onto his forehead. 

“Was it real?” she says.

For a moment he has trouble deciding whether she’s real: haloed in her darkened apartment by light from the street, hair falling onto her shoulders, her eyes searching.

“It was real,” he says, meaning the hospital, meaning the first time she stroked his cheek and felt his forehead for a fever. “For a while, it was real.”

“And everything we did together…” She shakes her head, looking down and away, the back of her hand falling against his shoulder. “We loved you, and now we don’t even know who you are. And I don’t mean your name.”

He takes her hand between his, keeping his grip loose. She can pull away if she wants. “Caitlin… All this began a very, very long time ago. It’s not anything anyone can undo or set right.”

“I know. You murdered three people fifteen years ago, and who knows how many before that? But you were a _good person_.” Her hand slips from his, but not far. “You were my friend, and we were making things better.”

There are platitudes that come to mind, all the sort that the two of them have laughed about before. She might be a romantic at heart, but not the type willing to delude herself in the face of evidence. She’s a scientist at heart too.

“It was real,” he says again, pushing himself up into a sitting position. “And more was real than I could ever tell you.”

She doesn’t meet his eyes, instead lifting his shirt to see the bandage, laying her hand lightly on it. “How does it feel?”

“It’s fine. I can run.”

“And yet you’re here.”

The bandage comes off with a faint ripping of tape that tears away a few hairs along with it. He can feel her finger in the ridge that remains in his side, the skin flushed an angry red, but no wound remaining. By tomorrow morning there’ll be nothing to see at all. His abilities come with more than a few blessings, but there are times he’s wished some scars would remain.

“I wanted to share it all with you so many times.” The words sound false, no matter how many times he really had sat in the lab, or lain in bed, or spent hours beside her on a stakeout, trying desperately to find a way to tell her that would make her understand. Not only the facts, but the reasons. Reasons she might comprehend, might not hate him for.

Caitlin is sitting on the edge of her repaired table. Close enough that it should be comforting, but also close enough that her discomfort, her icy reserve, is almost palpable in the air between them. “To share what? That you’re a murderer? That you crush people’s hearts with a… a vibrating hand?”

If only she knew how easily she’s crushing his. “That I only want to go home.”

She laughs abruptly. The room is getting darker, daylight fading. “We all got our homes taken away from us, right? Barry lost his parents. I lost Ronnie. So much for someone who makes us feel safe and loved.”

So she had heard what he said that night. “I gave you a home, Caitlin. I gave all of you homes. I saved Ronnie. I’m going to give Barry his parents back…”

“That’s crazy.”

“Is it?” He lets his eyes crackle red, seeing the glow on her face, in her eyes too, and seeing that she still doesn’t pull away. “Maybe everything _has_ been crazy for fifteen years. I started this madness, but now I’m trying to end it. With your help.”

He knows what she knows. That his crimes weren’t all fifteen years ago, that they’re not all mistakes he can fix. But he also knows what matters to her. “I don’t want to lie to you anymore. I never did.”

“You lied to me the _moment_ you shook my hand and said your name was Harrison Wells.”

“My real name…” He smiles a little, feels his teeth grazing his lip. Something the real Harry Wells left behind. “It seems a shame for you to call me that, when I’ve waited so long for you to call me Harrison.”

She bites her lip too. “You were my boss. It wasn’t professional. And why would I call you that now?”

“Because I’m not your boss now. And because you’ve waited just as long. To feel safe. To feel loved.”

“You _don’t_ make me feel safe.”

“And yet…” His fingertips trail up her forearm before his hand closes around it. “Here you are, alone with the bad guy, the murderer, the monster. Just as you were so many times in the lab, even after you found out who I was. I know you’re not scared of me, Caitlin. You know I could never hurt you.”

“You beat Barry bloody. You _killed_ Cisco in some other world.”

“And all I have ever done to you is try to tell you…”

Caitlin is studying his hand on her arm, the blackness between them. “I know,” she says. “Don’t you think I know what you meant in the van? What _I_ meant?” She reaches out with her free hand, grasping his jaw as if to get a better look at the eyes that no longer seem anything but human. “I don’t understand who or what you are, but I know you’re not a monster. A monster couldn’t make me feel the way you do.”

“Safe?”

“Yes.” Tentative, her thumb ghosts over his lips. “And the other thing.”

When he’d imagined this, fantasized about it, hoped for it, it had always been the end of an elegant, sophisticated evening: he the affluent older man sweeping her off her feet with opera, dinner, dancing, eloquent conversation, and every other advantage he’d thought he had over Ronnie Raymond and her many young suitors. In his dreams he’d taken her back to his mansion and they’d kissed sweetly by the glass-encased fire. The reality is... Well, he’d seriously misjudged the appeal of her tiny apartment, her old couch, and being pressed back into cushions as she kisses him. No evening dress, not the slightest bit of alcohol in either of them, but still she makes him gasp, surprised, with her mouth and her body and her hands sliding once more up his sides. “Caitlin…”

“Don’t,” she says, and tugs _hard_ on the t-shirt. “I need this. We both need this.”

Sometimes sex is just sex. It doesn’t mean commitment. Doesn’t have to mean anything. But in fifteen years he’s never had anyone as close to his heart as Caitlin Snow, and if she won’t let him talk her out of it, he can hardly do it to himself. He drops the t-shirt to the floor, wraps an arm around her and slides her onto his lap. They could do this so easily, open up his fly, push her panties aside, and find their relief. But he wants her more than that. He wants all of her.

There were cameras in this apartment once, which Cisco and Barry have since ripped out. So many cameras in the city, and he watched footage from all of them at one time or another. All except these. Gideon watched and analyzed, and never found anything of interest in Caitlin Snow’s life. Nothing strange, nothing threatening, and he could never bring himself to spy on her the way he has spied on Barry for years. When he sees her, he wants it to be real.

“Tell me you’ve worked out how to do this at normal speed,” she says as he kisses her throat, unbuttons her blouse. “Or are we going to be in Starling City in five minutes?”

Any mention of Starling City makes something stutter in his heart, but he shakes his head. “I’m a little more experienced than Barry.” Young Mr. Allen had never brought up the subject directly, but no secret was ever a secret very long while Cisco was around S.T.A.R. Labs.

Her hands smooth down his arms, over his biceps. “But you vibrate, don’t you?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No,” she says, thoughtful. “Not this time.”

Despite his age, his experience, it’s still been fifteen years since he made love to someone while the lightning hummed through him, through muscle and blood, sparks bursting in his brain. It’s difficult to drive it back, impossible to gather enough focus to separate from it completely with a beautiful woman’s lips on his, her body moving against him, with him. In the past year he’s exercised absolutely ironclad control over himself. He’s had to, to remain motionless in the chair, to stop himself from grabbing Barry or Cisco in a fury, from dashing out to rescue Caitlin from Rogues or robotic bees. And yet _this_ … He squeezes his eyes tightly closed, and knows she’ll see the flash behind his eyelids, vivid in the darkness of the room.

There’s no gasp of horror, just cool hands on his cheeks. “It’s okay,” she says, and there’s actually a hint of laughter in her voice. “My ex-fiancé flies and shoots fire from his hands. I can handle a little weird.”

He opens his eyes and remembers to breathe. “With everything put together, this might be a lot weird.”

“You know… you’re the _second_ person to undress me who causes sonic booms when he runs. So honestly I’m over it.”

That distracts him completely from any red glow that might have washed over his eyes. “Barry undressed you?”

She frowns, the way she does when there’s too much to explain. “Remember two Christmases ago, when you and Cisco brewed up eggnog for everyone in the Cortex?”

“I remember.” They’d all had a bit too much to drink – that was inevitable – but he’d spent the later part of the evening with Caitlin dozing drunkenly on his shoulder, his jacket wrapped around her, until Ronnie showed up to steer her home. So many knights in shining armor. 

Her hand has slipped down his chest. “I never figured out how these pants work. Are they held up by the speed force?”

“Something like that.” 

But she’s already found the clasp, is already moving her hand down the stiff length of him. “Harrison,” she says, slowly and softly, as though it’s an especially difficult foreign word she’s sounding out for the first time. “You could’ve had this before, you know. Years ago.”

“I didn’t know.” Didn’t he?

“We’ve been so good at protecting each other, haven’t we? You thought I was too innocent and I thought you were too vulnerable.”

Vulnerable? _Tess_ , he thinks. And then the wheelchair.

“But really you’re a time traveler with superpowers, and I’m…” Her eyes meet his. “I’m not what you thought I was either, am I?”

“No. No, you’re not.”

She takes off her skirt and his pants, sharp nails digging into his legs like an accusation, a reminder of past lies, but she says nothing except “Harrison” again when she kisses him in the darkness, “Harrison” when she presses him down onto the couch, moving over him, her hair tickling his face. Her bare skin is electric against his, untouched in so long, and he barely dares to breathe, lest he hurt her or disappoint her, or let the lightning take over again. But she kisses him, her breath on his lips, tongues brushing, and he holds her close.

Their lovemaking is long and slow, something to be lingered over and savored, even when breaths come in gasps, when her fingers dig tightly into his shoulders and he can _feel_ it when she murmurs “oh God yes”, can feel her in his blood, in his fingertips, behind his eyes.

“ _Cait_ ,” he says, half frightened by it, because who made him feel like this even then, fifteen years ago, when he was a hate-blinded force of nature in another body in another time?

She kisses him. “I’m here. Stay with me.”

Everything is quiet afterward, wrapped up in her beneath the blanket, feeling her breathe, her tiny movements against his skin, her fingers idly exploring his side, where a bullet wound used to be. It’s the kind of night he remembers from a life that was never his own, where love was an ever-present thing, found daily and nightly, not stumbled into like an uninvited guest.

“Is it the lightning?” she asks, her hand on his cheek. “Your eyes... I’ve never seen it happen with Barry.”

“Barry and I have very different relationships to the speed force.” _Some would say…_ “It’s easier for me not to hold it back. The vibrations. The…” He sweeps a hand across his face. “But we both know something about holding back.”

Her toes rub against his. “You have to go.”

“Yes.”

“And what’ll happen to all of us when you stop holding back? When you face Barry again?”

The entire explanation is one he doesn’t dare give her. “I don’t plan to hurt any of you. I don’t want to. You know what you all mean to me.”

“But home means more.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

What would she not do for her own home? For her friends? For Ronnie? She’d been willing to risk leveling Central City with a nuclear explosion for the sake of one man. She knows. She understands.

“And out there… between times and dimensions, between the particles, is there some time that’s ours?”

Time that’s more than a few hours that have slipped between the cracks of daily reality. As he lets the lightning in and uses his speed, pulling on his suit and boots, sliding the ring onto his finger, he feels every year stretching out before them, all those long years till his birthday and beyond.

“It’s all ours,” he says, standing before her, the air around him still flashing red. “Every last second of it.”

And he pulls on the mask.


End file.
